Driven by the New Catalyst: Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL Review. Page 15

RADEON X1000 series graphics cards, announced back in early October, have started to emerge in shops. Today we will be reviewing the RADEON X1800 XL as it comes from Sapphire Technologies and will be comparing its performance on the new Catalyst driver to that of NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GT and GTX.

Unreal Tournament 2004

The “pure speed” mode on the Torlan map doesn’t bring any useful info to the tester since all the graphics cards in this review have roughly the same speed here. The Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL lagging behind in the high resolutions of the “eye candy” mode is probably due to some specifics of the UT2004 benchmarking system because the overclocking has absolutely no effect.

More information can be obtained on the Metallurgy map and the cards on NVIDIA’s GPUs look preferable to ATI’s. It’s easy to explain: Unreal Tournament 2004 doesn’t use pixel shaders, but appreciates a high fill rate. Well anyway, those 90-100fps provided by the Sapphire is more than enough for any gamer.